John pulled his cab over when he heard Dr. Nawal M. Nour on the radio. The Sudanese American physician was describing the clinic she runs for women who have undergone female circumcision -- women like his wife, Miriam -- and John wanted to learn all he could. "Other doctors, they didn't know our culture," said John, a Somali immigrant who did not want the family's full name used. "Sometimes we felt, my wife and I, like people were looking at us differently.

February 7, 1996 | LYDIA A. NAYO, Lydia A. Nayo is an associate professor at Loyola Law School

If my mother is to be believed, Death has gotten greedy. It is Ruth Fields' contention that death comes in threes. By that I have always taken her meaning to be that three similar sorts of people will die in succession: three movie stars, three close family members, three prominent African American women. So I accepted and grieved for the losses of Rosalind Cash, Toni Cade Bambara and Madge Sinclair. But the death of Barbara Jordan I took as evidence of greed, pure and simple.

THIS WINTER, while pale foundation and red lipstick are stealing the show for fair-skinned women, African-American women are capitalizing on their deep skin tones and "going wild, mild or both," reports Antonio DuBois of Pigments salon in Beverly Hills. DuBois, who charges $40 for an hour-long session, is one of the area's few makeup artists who specializes in black clients, including many celebrities and businesswomen. "Lisa Bonet and Vanity represent the mild set," he says.

The church across the street from Paulette Hogan's apartment has long been her rock and so have the friends she's made there. It was her friends from ACTS Full Gospel Church of God in Christ who prayed with her when her mother passed away. They visited her in the hospital after she had a heart attack in 1997. When Hogan needed a new apartment, the church helped her find housing in a church-owned building nearby. Then, three years ago, Hogan discovered she was HIV-positive.

Bridget Moleboheng woke up at 5:45 a.m. in the hospital operating room. Gradually her senses returned. A splitting headache. An oxygen tube in her mouth and medical equipment attached to her body. But all of it was turned off. "A nurse came in and said it was a miracle I was still alive. " When Moleboheng arrived to give birth the day after Christmas last year, she says, the doctors and midwives at Sebokeng Hospital near Johannesburg told her she was behaving like an arrogant white "madam" by asking too many questions and refusing to have a caesarean section because they wouldn't let her read the consent form.

Turns out there might just be such a thing as too much hygiene. Women in Africa who wash out their vaginas with soap or clean it out using cloth or paper are more at risk of contracting HIV, according to a new study in PLoS Medicine. The international team of researchers looked at data pulled from 13 studies involving 14,874 women, 791 of whom ended up with HIV. The women reported whether they used any particular methods to clean, tighten or dry out their vaginas. After controlling for age, marital status and the number of sexual partners the women had had in the past three months, the authors found women were about one and a half times as likely to acquire HIV if they used a cloth or paper to wipe out their vaginas, and one and a quarter times as likely to become infected if they used soap to clean it out. Women who washed their vaginas with soap were also more likely to have bacterial vaginosis or disrupted vaginal flora (as in, a disruption in the normal, healthy balance of microbes that live in the vagina and protect it from disease)

Etta Cummings stood in the back of a small room filled with sympathetic faces. Her failing eyes were obscured by big, dark glasses. She leaned on her cane, clutched her bright caftan and prepared to take one very big step. "My name is Etta Cummings. I'm a diabetic. My diabetes is totally out of control. I didn't take it seriously for many, many years," she said by way of introduction. "By this time, my health started deteriorating, so I'm on the run to correct it." Heads nodded in support.

Coming off the Rodney G. King-inspired uprising of 1992, L.A. was, for a time, a pretty dismal place. But for African Americans, a bright spot emerged on, of all places, the local bestseller list of July 5 that year, where three novels written by black women jostled for position -- Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale" landed the top spot, Alice Walker's "Possessing the Secret of Joy" hit No. 6 and Toni Morrison's "Jazz" No. 8.

As incense smoke danced in the sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Anthonia Nwoga knelt in the hushed chapel for the long-awaited moment. It took but a few seconds. Off came the white veil she had worn for the last year. On went a black one that she may keep for life.

In Chika Unigwe's novel "On Black Sisters Street," the snow-covered streets of Antwerp, Belgium, are a beacon of freedom to the four disadvantaged African women who serve as the book's protagonists. Recruited in Lagos, Nigeria, by a fat slug of a sex trafficker named Dele, the women work as prostitutes in glass stalls along the byways of Antwerp's seedy red light district. They dream big, though, and they never make excuses about why they are there. In fact, big dreams are why the women decide to work in the sex trade in exchange for passage to Europe, which they view as a paradise of opportunity and riches, far removed from the crushing squalor and bleak opportunities in Africa.